Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (1998) / Chapter Skim
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8. Helping Children with Reading Difficulties in Grades 1 to 3
8. Helping Children with Reading Difficulties in Grades 1 to 3
Pages 247-274
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From page 247... ...
In all cases, the question is what kinds of additional instruction (usually called "interventions" because they are not part of the regular school reading instruction) are likely to help.
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From page 248... ...
. The theoretical importance and strong empirical relationship of phonological awareness to success in learning to read was discussed in Chapters 2 and 4, and the demonstrated benefits of phonological awareness training for children who have not yet begun formal reading instruction were reviewed in Chapters 5 and 6.
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From page 249... ...
. Half of the at-risk group received individual tutoring in phonological awareness for a total of about 10 to 15 hours over a 20-week period, during which time regular classroom reading instruction also commenced for all participants.
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From page 250... ...
have also explored the question as to what degree of explicitness in such instruction is most effective for kindergartners with weak letter knowledge and phonological awareness skills when they begin school. At-risk kindergartners were assigned to one of four conditions: a highly explicit and intensive phonologically oriented instruction; a less explicit phonologically oriented instruction delivered in the context of meaningful experiences with reading and writing text; regular classroom support; or no treatment.
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From page 251... ...
Hence, it is unrealistic to think of phonological awareness training as a one-shot inoculation against reading difficulties for children at risk. Rather, its greater demonstrated value is as the first of many aggressive steps that can be taken in an ongoing effort to intensify all facets of reading instruction for schoolchildren who need it.
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From page 252... ...
One of the earliest studies of phonological awareness training for disabled readers focused on phoneme analysis, blending, and phonological decoding of text for students ages 7 to 12 with serious reading difficulties (Williams, 1980)
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From page 253... ...
. A final study compared immediate and long-term outcomes for groups of children with severe reading disabilities who had received one of four types of training: phonological awareness training alone; reading instruction alone, based on the Reading Recovery approach, but with no coverage at all of letter-sound relationships; training in both phonological and reading skills in combination; and no treatment controls (Hatcher et al., 1994)
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From page 254... ...
Second, it is clear that phonologically oriented training programs are not the only type of intervention that can facilitate word recognition, although this approach produces the strongest gain in phonemic awareness and phonological decoding when combined with training in other reading skills. Other, more orthographically oriented approaches have been of equivalent benefit for improving word reading in this population, many of whom have already acquired some decoding skills (although these may be minimal)
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From page 255... ...
For the initial 10 days of a child's participation in Reading Recovery, the teacher gathers information about the child's current literacy strategies and knowledge. Following this period, referred to as "roaming the known," each lesson includes (a)
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From page 256... ...
Typically, teachers conduct Reading Recovery lessons with four children a day and spend the remainder of their day as first-grade teachers. During the course of a school year, about 8 to 11 children per Reading Recovery teacher generally complete the program successfully and another 27 percent of children are dismissed from the program without having successfully reached criterion performance.
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From page 257... ...
, and a control group -- the results indicated that following 70 days of program intervention the students in the Reading Recovery clearly outperformed the students in the other three intervention programs on an array of measures of reading achievement. The study being described here contained high amounts of familiar book reading time for the reading recovery group and for one additional intervention group compared to much less time for the other groups.
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From page 258... ...
Despite the controversies regarding the efficacy of Reading Recovery, a number of intervention programs owe their design features to it, and it offers two important lessons. First, the program demonstrates that, in order to approach reading instruction with a deep and principled understanding of the reading process and its implications for instruction, teachers need opportunities for sustained professional development.
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From page 259... ...
, provides an opportunity to transfer phonological awareness training and grapheme-phoneme practice from text to automatic reading of sight words. The third component is writing for sounds.
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From page 260... ...
Finally, reading comprehension is fostered throughout the reading of the new book through predictions, discussions, and opportunities to write about the new story. In summary, this supplementary intervention has four driving principles: children learn to read by reading in meaningful contexts; reading instruction should be differentiated based on the diagnosis of learner need; phonics instruction should be systematic and paced according to a child's developing hypotheses about how words work; and reading, writing, and spelling develop in synchrony as children interact with others who assist their learning and development.
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From page 261... ...
This is organized as follows: · for alphabet students -- review of previous letters/sounds, new letter/sound instruction, reading (reading to the student and/or assisted reading) , assisted creative writing; · for word-family students -- review of previous word families, new word family instruction, reading (reading to the student and/or assisted reading)
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From page 262... ...
. COMPREHENSIVE LITERACY-ORIENTED EFFORTS WITH SMALL GROUPS OF CHILDREN Early Intervention in Reading Early Intervention in Reading is an intervention that took place in regular first-grade classrooms and was directed at improving the reading achievement of the lowest-performing five to seven readers in each class (Taylor et al., 1994)
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From page 263... ...
Writing activity included maintaining a personal journal (during which children received guidance in the use of phonetically plausible invented spellings) and constructing sentences around word patterns to which the children had been exposed in the reading activity.
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From page 264... ...
COMPUTER SUPPORT FOR READING INSTRUCTION Recent advances in computer technology offer new support for reading instruction. Digitized and high-quality synthetic speech has been incorporated into programs focusing on phonological awareness and issues related to emergent literacy, letter-name and lettersound knowledge, phonological decoding, spelling, and support for word decoding and comprehension while reading and writing stories.
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From page 265... ...
Comprehensive literacy software programs that have been developed more recently and for which systematic evaluation has begun include Foundations in Learning by Breakthrough, Early Reading Program by Waterford, and the Little Planet Literacy Series by Young Children's Literacy Project. Although the promise of new computer technology is real, it is still only a promise by any large-scale measure of effectiveness to address reading instruction.
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From page 266... ...
In summary, with the availability of technology, quality software, and well-prepared practitioners, there is the potential for students to benefit. The materials described in this section were designed to offer distinct instructional strategies for learning to read; evaluation of each has revealed successful literacy growth and development in children (Sharp et al, 1995; Heuston, 1997; Zimmerman, 1997)
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From page 267... ...
Nevertheless, the value of retention as a practice for preventing reading difficulties has not yet been amply demonstrated.
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From page 268... ...
Congress intended that special education should address the problem of identifying and treating reading disabilities during the early school grades. However, the law contained a definition of specific reading disability that has often contributed to an unfortunate delay in identification and treatment: to be eligible for special education placement, children must exhibit a severe discrepancy, typically 1.5 standard deviation units, between standardized tests of their reading achievement and their general intellectual ability.
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From page 269... ...
94-142, however, still includes the earlier discrepancy criterion for specific learning disabilities. In addition to the need for earlier intervention with less emphasis on aptitude-achievement discrepancy, there are a number of other complexities involved in considering the role of special education for young children with reading difficulties.
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From page 270... ...
Students in the Early Literacy Project also continue to receive instruction in Project Read, a systematic approach to phonics instruction that was in place in the participating schools. The comparison children for a study of the effectiveness of the ELP program were students in special education settings who were receiving Project Read instruction only.
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From page 271... ...
. Those interventions for which, currently, there are no confirmed or replicated research findings that have nevertheless been touted to address reading and learning disabilities include: (a)
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From page 272... ...
Furthermore, a close examination of the successful supplementary interventions described in this chapter reveals a number of common features across these studies: · Duration of the intervention -- generally occurring on a daily basis for the duration of a school year or a good portion of the school year. · The amount of instructional time -- all successful interventions involve more time in reading and writing than for children not at risk -- but extra time is not sufficient in itself.
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From page 273... ...
Professional development of teachers, teachers aides, and professional or volunteer tutors were integral to each program -- there is an important relationship between the skill of the teacher and the response of the children to early intervention. Effective intervention programs pay close attention to the preparation and supervision of the teachers or tutors.
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